Here are the bike links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:

Where do we bike? Or, at least, where do people who track their rides with GPS bike? Strava knows. Among the local lessons in this beautiful “heat map”: the east-side greenways are very popular (especially NE Going and SE Lincoln/Harrison); and Broadway is by far the most-used route through downtown.

Regressive fee: “Polls do not tell us the right thing to do,” writes local Ph.D student Paul Manson in a blog post that tears into the city’s per-household street fee proposal by discussing its context: 1990s ballot measures that slanted Oregon’s local tax system toward the wealthy.

Auto advocacy: A coalition of car-loving San Franciscans is pushing a nonbinding ballot issue calling for “restoring transportation balance in San Francisco” by charging less for auto parking and ticketing jaywalkers.

Financing suburbanization: Watch out for the rhetorical slight-of-hand in this New York Times op-ed (the stats for cities include suburbs, too), but the underlying argument is strong: with both young and old suddenly eager to live in central cities, political momentum for cutting the federal home mortgage subsidy is actually rising.

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47 Comments

SpiffyApril 28, 2014 at 9:17 am

Thief shaming: SFPD breaks the law by violating the posting rules of craigslist…

The report also states: “no breathalyzer was performed” — a point Cameron intends to delve deeper into, he says.

Simon’s husband, a York Regional Police officer, was driving behind his wife that drizzly night, but little is mentioned about him as a witness in the police report. He pulled over when Brandon was struck, and shortly after both were allowed to go home. It was another witness who pulled over to tend to Brandon and called 911.”

Kilometer per hour to mile per hour conversion factor is 0.62137119224, so roughly, the driver was traveling 54 mph where 48 mph would be equivalent to speed limit: 6 mph over limit.

For my own driving, I make a point of keeping within 5 mph over the limit. One mph over represents the likelihood of a citation as far as I’m concerned. Whether most people consider 6mph over, or 1mph over 48 mph, to be ‘speeding’, is likely debatable. 48 mph limit basically makes this a high speed highway.

I saw the same sort of orange pennant on a horizontal fibreglass pole in Sweden in 1968. The pole had a decorative tip at the end that I suspect further deterred drivers from passing too closely. Probably made a loud noise inside a car that came too close; remember the sound of the old curb feelers that used to be on cars?

Upper Echelon Fitness is in that building. I’m willing to bet a lot of indoor riding is done there with Garmin units on to capture power/heartrate data. Once uploaded to Strava they would show up as unmoving blobs on the map.

I was going to post a similar comment. I’m sure many people log their commutes on Strava, but I highly doubt it is very representative of the bike commuting population. Probably highly dominated by the S&F types, which may skew the results to show busier streets (including some without bike facilities) as more relatively popular than they really are among cyclists.

Hmm … after taking a close look at the heat map, though, I don’t see a lot of obvious anomalies vs. what I would expect from the commuting population as a whole. One of the few that I can find is in Raleigh Hills, where I know there are a few commuters taking Homewood and/or Woodside as an alternative to Jamieson, but the map shows almost no heat on those two streets compared to Jamieson.

Also it seems odd for it to show almost no bike traffic on SE 11th and 12th between Hawthorne and Division.

On another note, I see the heat map shows some amount of use of the Wildwood Trail — but only closer in, not beyond Saltzman.

“Wutz uh Set Stone. Iz dat any stone ah set on da ground” he asks in his honestly aquired deep south redneck accent.

Despite the two different residential buildings I was manual labor on on high school and my autistic obsession with home construction & general contractor shows on HGTV and such I don’t remember the term “sett stone”. That said until I moved to the Pacific NW I didn’t know why anyone wouldn’t love moss.

I had used Strava for tracking some (but not even most) commutes but I didn’t like it because it doesn’t have an auto-pause feature like some other tracking software does (Kinetic and GPSlite). When the app doesn’t pause itself, all those inner city lights and stops mess up my MPH average. 🙂

I use Strava on every one of my rides (I really, really like the app), most of which are commutes. I’m not a fast rider and I don’t care about personal bests, but it is fun for me to see all of the information available.

“…”They were riding in the middle of an unlit road at 1:30 a.m. Their bicycles were not properly illuminated, nor did they have the proper reflectors,” he says. …” (‘he’, is the lawyer for the woman driving.) ctvnews-barrie

Story says the family of the young man, a kid really, hit and killed, alleges the person driving was speeding, possibly intoxicated. Interesting notes offered by people in the comment section, is that person driving was slightly over the speed limit, impaired, possibly on the cell, and was being followed by her husband, who is a cop. The kid’s estate has no money.

“…For now, Cameron says the family is just struggling to “understand why their son is a defendant in this action.” ” ctvnews-barrie

Cameron is the lawyer representing the family of the kid. As always, difficult to know from reading brief news stories about incidents, but so far, it seems there’s plenty of denial to go around on the part of parties involved or associated with them.

I’d design the key with a couple of those really tiny top grade n52 magnets embedded in the key body (at opposite orientations) so that when you drop in the key and cam the lock body the key self aligns with matching magnets in the lock body.
I’d use a slightly bigger version of this magnet to match up with a quick release keyring mechanism.

I doubt that most U-Locks are foiled via picking. My guess is that most are busted via brute force methods or improper locking. (old Bic Pen foiled locks excepted) Still, that’s pretty clever and would be more apt to pay for something like that on a safe or a deadbolt lock.

wsbob
Kilometer per hour to mile per hour conversion factor is 0.62137119224, so roughly, the driver was traveling 54 mph where 48 mph would be equivalent to speed limit: 6 mph over limit.
For my own driving, I make a point of keeping within 5 mph over the limit. One mph over represents the likelihood of a citation as far as I’m concerned. Whether most people consider 6mph over, or 1mph over 48 mph, to be ‘speeding’, is likely debatable. 48 mph limit basically makes this a high speed highway.

it was a “wet/drizzly, dark road” at 1:30 AM . her speed was “estimated” . Who knows what the real speed was ?

“Simon’s husband, a York Regional Police officer, was driving behind his wife that drizzly night, but little is mentioned about him as a witness in the police report. He pulled over when Brandon was struck, and shortly after both were allowed to go home.”

It APPEARS that she didn’t even know how many kids she hit.

seems also a reasonable ASSUMPTION , that she (the driver) and her husband “shortly after both were allowed to go home.” “no breathalyzer was performed” smacks of either gross ineptitude or police cronyism or the kids were so dazed that the didn’t even mention that their friend was hurt/missing ?
>> It was another witness who pulled over to tend to Brandon and called 911

unbelievable.

she is suing : the dead boy , the two other injured boys , the dead boy’s parents, and even his brother, who has since died. She’s also suing the County of Simcoe for failing to maintain the road.

Do you know the guidelines and required procedures law enforcement in Canada is obliged to follow, to determine whether a breathalyzer test should be requested of a driver? Equally possible as the reasons you’ve suggested, is that the person driving was not impaired, accounting for why a breathalyzer test was not given.

At any rate, readers of a bike weblog being able to accurately and responsibly establish cause or fault for this collision, or any, simply by reading a sarcastic Monday Roundup story tip, and a couple stories, is unlikely.

More interesting to me, are questions raised by the reasons the person that was driving, reportedly is suing the young man’s estate for. It’s likely not the money, because, word from the news stories is, the kid’s estate has no money.

Hypothetical case: A vulnerable road user completely disregards responsibility in their use of the road, representing a major contribution to the occurrence of a collision in which they die, and also cause great harm to others driving or riding in motor vehicles, involved in, but that survive the collision.

Assume for the hypothetical, that on the part of the persons driving or riding, there was no violation of laws; speeding, intoxication, etc.

One of central questions here, is whether circumstances can exist in which a survivor driving or traveling by motor vehicle, truly has been injured to some degree by irresponsible actions of a vulnerable road user. And, whether there can be circumstances in which this type survivor rightfully should be compensated for their injury, from the deceased road users estate.

GlowBoy
Hmm … after taking a close look at the heat map, though, I don’t see a lot of obvious anomalies vs. what I would expect from the commuting population as a whole.

Oh good, so you can’t be an insufferable anti-elitist-elitist?

I swear to god, the “errmagerd, STRAVA, blah!” folks on this site who whine about strava, whine about any bike that happens to have skinny tires and looks like a race bike, whine about lycra, ad infinitum – are the biggest snobs and boors I’ve ever witnessed. I have never, ever met any hardcore rider who actually races who has the level of snobbery as most of the posters here exhibit towards anything that might not be “regular ‘ol commutin'”.

Well, maybe the Porsche driver who pulled up on my left on a narrow, busy, no shoulders road last week and informed me that I was riding too far out in the lane and he knew this because he was a Cat 4 racer.